Read Online Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie - Free Book Online Page B

embarrassed laugh, as though not really taking in what he meant.
    “Mr. Marshall wrote me about it,” she said, “About that story that Jackie made up - how it was all true after all. That someone did give him a lift back that night to Drymouth. So it was you, was it?”
    “Yes,” said Calgary. “It was I.”
    “I really can't get over it,” said Maureen. “Talked about it half the night, Joe and I did. Really, I said, it might be something on the pictures. Two years ago, isn't it, or nearly?”
    “About that, yes.”
    “Just the sort of thing you do see on the pictures, and of course you say to yourself that sort of thing's all nonsense, it wouldn't happen in real life. And now there it is! It does happen! It's really quite exciting in a way, isn't it?”
    “I suppose,” said Calgary, “that it might be thought of like that.” He was watching her with a vague kind of pain.
    She chattered on quite happily.
    “There's poor old Jackie dead and not able to know about it. He got pneumonia, you know, in prison. I expect it was the damp or something, don't you?”
    She had, Calgary realised, a definite romantic image of prison in her mind's eye. Damp underground cells with rats gnawing one's toes.
    “At the time, I must say,” she went on, “him dying seemed all for the best.” “Yes, I suppose so. Yes, I suppose it must have done.”
    “Well, I mean, there he was, shut up for years and years and years. Joe said I'd better get a divorce and I was just setting about it.”
    “You wanted to divorce him?”
    “Well, it's no good being tied to a man who's going to be in prison for years, is it? Besides, you know, although I was fond of Jackie and all that, he wasn't what you call the steady type. I never did think really that our marriage would last.”
    “Had you actually started proceedings for divorce when he died?”
    “Well, I had in a kind of way. I mean, I'd been to a lawyer. Joe got me to go. Of course, Joe never could stand Jackie.”
    “Joe is your husband?”
    “Yes. He works in the electricity. Got a very good job and they think a lot of him. He always told me Jackie was no good, but of course I was just a kid and silly then. Jackie had a great way with him, you know.”
    “So it seems from all I've heard about him.”
    “He was wonderful at getting round women -1 don't know why, really. He wasn't good-looking or anything like that. Monkey-face, I used to call him. But all the same, he'd got a way with him. You'd find you were doing anything he wanted you to do. Mind you, it came in useful once or twice. Just after we were married he got into trouble at the garage where he was working over some work done on a customer's car. I never understood the rights of it. Anyway, the boss was ever so angry. But Jackie got round the boss's wife. Quite old, she was. Must have been near on fifty, but Jackie flattered her up, played her off this way and that until she didn't know whether she was on her head or her heels. She'd have done anything for him in the end. Got round her husband, she did, and got him to say as he wouldn't prosecute if Jackie paid the money back. But he never knew where the money came from! It was his own wife what provided it. That reely gave us a laugh, Jackie and me!”
    Calgary looked at her with faint repulsion. “Was it so very funny?”
    “Oh, I think so, don't you? Reely, it was a scream. An old woman like that crazy about Jackie and raking out her savings for him.”
    Calgary sighed. Things were never, he thought, the way you imagined them to be. Every day he found himself less attracted to the man whose name he had taken such trouble to vindicate. He was almost coming to understand and share the point of view which had so astounded him at Sunny Point.
    “I only came here, Mrs. Clegg,” he said, “to see if there was anything I could, well, do for you to make up for what had happened.”
    Maureen Clegg looked faintly puzzled.
    “Very nice of you, I'm sure,” she said.